Beebo snatched it from her and picked up the box like a miser going after a cache of gold. And Laura, seeing her chance, grabbed the purse and a sweater that hung on the back of a chair and backed silently out of the bedroom. She fled, on feet made feather-light with fear, to the front door. She ran down the stairs with all the speed her fear could muster and ran all the way—two blocks—to Seventh Avenue.
After a few frantic moments of scanning the street and looking back over her shoulder she hailed a cab and climbed in, crying audibly. “Drive uptown,” she told the man. “Just drive uptown for a few minutes.”
“Okay,” he said, giving her a quick, cynical once over.
Laura looked up and saw Beebo rush into Fourth Street as the cab turned around and headed north, and she sank down in the back seat, her hands over her face. She let him drive her almost to Times Square before she could control her sobs and give him Jack’s address.
What if Beebo’s already there? she wondered suddenly. Oh, God! She would be, of course. But Jack would save her somehow. Better to be with him, even if it meant facing Beebo again.
Chapter Six
LAURA WAS RIGHT. Beebo went straight to Jack’s apartment. She stormed in and beat noisily on his door until he opened it.
“Christ in the foothills!” he exclaimed, pulling on the door and looking into her wild furious face. She entered and slammed it behind her.
“She’ll be over here in a few minutes,” Beebo said wildly, waving the diary at him. “I haven’t read much of this but I’ve read enough to know what a bitch she is. And you—you—” For once in her life Beebo was at a loss for words; “You lousy crawling scum sonofabitch, you’ve been egging her on! You’ve been putting ideas into her head—about leaving me.”
She ranted hysterically at him, and Jack, although Laura had never described her diary to him, began to get the idea in a hurry.
“Where is she now?” he said quietly when he could get a word in edgewise.
“I don’t know, but she’ll be here before long. Whenever we have a quarrel she drags her can over here as fast as she can move. You’re her father confessor, her lover by proxy. She tells you everything. She only lives with me.” She spat it at him enviously. “I’m her lover for good and real but I’m not good enough to know what she thinks or what she does. She saves that for you. I’ll kill her! By God, I will.”
“Scram, Beebo,” Jack said. His low voice was in sharp contrast to her own, loud and hard with wrath.
“What’s the matter, isn’t my company good enough for you?” She turned on him suddenly. He would have to take her threats till Laura got there; she couldn’t hold them back.
“It’s just that I don’t like prospective murderers,” Jack said. “They make me nervous.”
“You bastard! You holier-than-thou bastard! You think you’re so damn superior because you’re still on the wagon. You are on the wagon, I can tell. You look so goddamn sober it’s repulsive. Repulsive!”
“That’s the word for it, all right,” Jack agreed. His compliant attitude only goaded her further.
“You hate me because Laura only comes to see you when she feels bad. She lives with me. But she doesn’t give a damn about you until she feels bad. Then she comes running to good old Jack!”
“Beebo,” he said and did not raise his voice. “When I lost Terry I did a hell of a lot of drinking and hollering. I came and drank your whiskey and told you my troubles and you listened to me. And it helped. Now you’re welcome to my whiskey—there’s still a little in the kitchen—and you’re welcome to cry on my shoulder. But you’re not going to murder anybody, here or anywhere else.”
“Only Laura,” Beebo said, and her voice was low now, too.
“Nobody,” Jack said. “Now scram, or I’ll throw you out.”
Beebo grabbed the lapels of his sport jacket. “She cheated on me, Jack. You gave her the idea so don’t try to squirm out of it.”
“Cheated on you with who?”
“An Indian!” Her eyes were so big and her face so contorted that Jack came very near laughter.
“What tribe?” he asked carefully.
“Not an American Indian, you owl-eyed idiot! An Indian Indian. A dancer! Jesus!” And she lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “A dancer!”
“Classical or belly?”
“Oh, shut up! You think it’s funny!” She gave him a hard shove, but Jack didn’t shove easily. He just stood his ground and surprised her. “It doesn’t matter who she is, anyway,” she said and ran a distraught hand through her close-cropped dark hair that waved and rolled around her head and used to delight Laura. “What matters is, they’ve been sleeping together and that cheeky little bitch—”
“Which one?”
“Jack, goddamn you, quit interrupting me!” She paused to glare at him and then said, “Tris. The dancer. She had the nerve to come over to the apartment. Tried to tell me they met at the Hobby Shop. Oh, God!” And she gave a despairing laugh.
“Maybe they did.” He offered it unobtrusively.
“Who’re you kidding?” Beebo snapped. “Laura admitted she went to the girl’s apartment.”
“After you pounded it out of her.”
Beebo held the diary out to him. “Read this, Jack. It’s all in here,” she said.
“Does it say they slept together?”
“Damn right!”
“Did you read it?”
“No, but it’s in here,” she said positively, in the grip of the spiraling violence that possessed her. “Jack Mann, college graduate, engineer, former gay boy, former whiskey drinker, former human being. Current know-it-all and champion bastard of Greenwich
